09/20/2026 - "The Calling" (Genesis 12:1-9)
You can watch the sermon here.
Last week we talked about Noah and the Ark and the animals and floods and rainbows. Noah’s story is one of the last stories of what’s called the Primeval Narrative. This is the first part of Genesis that talks about creation and how it was nearly destroyed.
This week we transition from the Primeval Narrative into the Patriarchal and Matriarchal Narrative. Instead talking about all of creation in the entire world, we are narrowed in on one family line that several major world religions consider their forefathers and mothers in their faith.
And it all begins with a man being called to leave behind everything he knew in order to follow God. Eventually, he will be known as Abraham, and his wife will be known as Sarah. But for now, they are at the beginning of their story, their names still Abram and Sarai for now.
Scripture: Genesis 12:1-9
The Lord said to Abram, “Leave your land, your family, and your father’s household for the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation and will bless you. I will make your name respected, and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you, those who curse you I will curse; all the families of the earth will be blessed because of you.”
Abram left just as the Lord told him, and Lot went with him. Now Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all of their possessions, and those who became members of their household in Haran; and they set out for the land of Canaan. When they arrived in Canaan, Abram traveled through the land as far as the sacred place at Shechem, at the oak of Moreh. The Canaanites lived in the land at that time. The Lord appeared to Abram and said, “I give this land to your descendants,” so Abram built an altar there to the Lord who appeared to him. From there he traveled toward the mountains east of Bethel, and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the Lord and worshipped in the Lord’s name. Then Abram set out toward the arid southern plain, making and breaking camp as he went.
What is the farthest distance you have ever moved? I’ve now lived in four different states, and out of those four, the longest move was between Oregon and Texas - both in terms of distance, and in terms of culture.
But I know that many people have moved much farther than that, sometimes moving to different countries for work or school. With communications being what they are today, moving to a new place isn’t nearly as daunting as it used to be. My mom moved from Germany to Texas in order to go to college, and she remembers the only way she could talk to her parents was by calling them collect. They would refuse the call, and then call her right back since it was cheaper for them to make long-distance calls from the military base they were living on. In contrast, when I went to college, we could FaceTime whenever we wanted to. Even more than that, we shared locations, so she could go into Find My Friends and see where I was at any given moment. She says it made her miss me a little less seeing where I was - or, at least, where my phone was.
But even though moving is a lot less daunting today in terms of being able to stay in touch with loved ones, we have a lot of privilege in being able to have phones and messaging apps that let us stay in touch across the globe. We even have the privilege to be able to travel back to places we’ve lived to see those loved ones sometimes. But that requires time and money that many people do not have. Even today with all of our advances in technology, there are refugees and immigrants who leave the familiarity of their home countries for a strange new place in search of a better, safer life. People do this because their new country has opportunities for study and work, or because their home countries have become too dangerous due to wars, political and religious persecution, or repeated natural disasters. Sometimes they do have to leave behind everything, fleeing with just the clothes on their backs, with no idea if they will ever be able to return home and see their friends and family again.
Their experiences are much closer to what God called Abram to do in our passage today.
Leaving one’s homeland to settle elsewhere during this time meant making a clean break from everything you knew. There were no phones, no email, no mail even. You were saying goodbye to all of your friends and family that you were leaving behind, with the knowledge that most likely you would never see them again. And most of the time, a move like this would be due to things like famine or escaping conflict or needing more space to raise your flocks of animals. Not because you heard the voice of God telling you to go somewhere that you may have never even heard of before.
Like I mentioned earlier, my longest move was when I was eighteen, from Oregon, where I’d grown up, to Texas to go to college. And when I tell people that I did that, I always get one question - “why?” Which is a fair question, because why would somebody born in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, where there are plenty of good universities that I could’ve gone to, decide to move to Dallas, Texas, of all places, to go to college?
And while there are a lot of reasons I could give as to why, the reality is I made my decision in an instant while sitting in our dark green chair in our living room one random day. I’d been thinking about it for weeks, so it wasn’t impulsive. But as I had weighed the pros and cons of each school, taking into account the opportunities I would have, the community, the professors, and everything else, I kept coming back to one thing. Moving to Texas to attend SMU just felt right. It felt like that’s where God was calling me to be. So I told my parents that’s where I was going to go and signed my acceptance letter. And just a few months later, I was on a plane to Dallas to move into my dorm.
And now I can’t imagine my life had I not done that. Maybe I still would’ve ended up in seminary, maybe Noah and I still would’ve somehow met, and maybe I still somehow would’ve become the pastor at UCLB. But now I have no idea how else my life could’ve gone to get me to this exact point. And back then when I was deciding on where to go to college, I couldn’t have imagined ending up here.
And things ended up being so much better than I ever thought they would be.
Abram had every reason not to leave his home and his father to go to a place he’d never been, had never seen, on the promise from a God that he’d never heard from before that God would bless him and use him to bless the entire world. He probably couldn’t imagine those blessings coming true, couldn’t imagine what his life would look like in his new home. But he still went, and Sarai and the rest of his household went with him. They all left what they had known and set off into the unknown, trusting that God would be with them, and that God was leading them into something better than what they were leaving behind. They would get a glimpse of the future as they traveled, but for a childless couple in their 70s, the idea of having descendants must have seemed impossible. Maybe it even made God’s promise of blessing them in their new home seem even more far-fetched.
But they kept going. Eventually they settled in Hebron, after a few detours to Egypt, the Negeve, and a few other places.
Just like our own lives, Abram and Sarai and the rest of their household’s journey to their new home wasn’t a straight, easy line. There were detours, and twists and turns and places where they temporarily had to settle before being able to move along. And at one point, Abram returns to Bethel, where just like in our passage today, he worships God. In other translations this is translated as “called on the name of the Lord.” In our passage today Abram did this in response to God’s further promises and blessings that he’d received just the verse prior. But here, a chapter later, there’s no real inciting incident that we can trace as to why he went back to Bethel to worship at this altar instead of building a new one like he had been doing. And we don’t get an explanation afterwards; instead we get into the story of how Abram’s and Lot’s servants were fighting because there wasn’t enough resources of both families.
I wonder if all of the traveling, all of the staying in places that weren’t their final destination made Abram start questioning whether or not God was still with him. So he turned around and went back to the last place where he’d felt God - Bethel - and worshipped again. Hoping to get some reassurance that God was still with him, hear the promise again, maybe get a blessing of some sort so he could continue on with more confidence. Maybe he has some nostalgia for the time we read about today, when the journey was just beginning and everything seemed so easy and new, and God’s voice seemed so strong in his ears. So he returns to Bethel and repeats the same worship he did before, hoping to get a similar result.
But all Abram is met with is silence.
Because God isn’t in Bethel anymore. God has moved past Bethel and is now ahead of Abram, waiting for him to keep moving forward into the new life God has planned for him. It’s only when Abram leaves the comforting nostalgia of Bethel and heads for where he should be going - Canaan - that God speaks to him again.
Nostalgia is powerful thing; it’s like a warm fuzzy blanket. It’s easy to snuggle into and lose ourselves in. We can sand down the sharp edges of those memories, soften the focus and blur out the imperfections. So when we compare it to the present, it can make our life now seem much colder and harsher in comparison. The temptation to stay snuggled in that warm blanket, to keep going back to what we’ve done before because it’s comfortable and safe, is a real one. Doing the same things over and over again is comforting because it’s familiar, you know what to expect and you know that it’s going to make you feel good.
But who we were and where we were back then is not the same as who we are and where we are right now. And that means what worked back then may not work now. And that can be scary to admit! It’s admitting that we didn’t know everything back then, and we still don’t know everything now. But acknowledging that can also be really exciting and open up new possibilities for us to learn and grow that we may have never considered before.
Because if Abram had succumbed to nostalgia and stayed in Bethel, staying at the same altar and worshipping the same way again and again, he never would’ve seen the blessings that God had promised him. He never would’ve had children, never seen the descendants that would go on to become as numerous as the stars. And more than anything else, had he stayed in Bethel or even never left his home in the first place, Scripture and tradition says that three religions would not exist, including our own.
So thank God that he didn’t. He got back on track and kept moving to Hebron.
So the next time you feel the temptation to stay in Bethel, to do something just because it’s what you’ve always done, I invite you to take a step back and see if there’s just one thing about it you could try and do differently. It doesn’t have to be as drastic as Abram, moving to an entirely new country. But for example, if you’re cooking your family’s traditional holiday meal, is there a new dish that you could introduce - or even feel the permission to not make that one dish that everyone politely skips over every year? If there’s a party or event you host every year, what is one thing you could change about the format or the meal or even the location? These are little things that you’re probably already doing to a certain extent, but they help our minds get used to accepting new ideas, new ways of doing things, and keep us away from the temptation of the fuzzy blanket of nostalgia.
And, if you’ve been looking for the permission to let go of practices and rituals that may have once helped you but now seem to be holding you back - then you’ve found it.
Or if you’ve been looking for the permission to pick up something new, something that scares you a bit, but it just seems like it’s the right thing to do - then you’ve found that permission too.
Because you may find that in letting go of the demands of nostalgia, in throwing off the warm fuzzy blanket and stepping outside of your comfort zone, that the present isn’t as cold as you thought it might be.
Instead you may find blessings that are far greater than what you could’ve ever imagined.
All it takes is being willing to listen to the voice of God calling you forward, and taking that first step in faith.